The cradle opened, releasing the lifeboat, which moved rapidly away from the ship. After a moment the lifeboats thrusters pushed it further away from the Beauregard, at an accelerating speed.

She switched to the lifeboats own sensor arrays in time to see light blossom all along the Beauregards belly as emergency explosive charges blew through several hull plates. The nova drive came tumbling out seconds later, accompanied by a storm of shattered electronics and escaping air.

She ordered the lifeboat to give chase.

Megan? Do you hear me?

It was Tarrant again.

You think Im finished, but Im not. Ive come through worse and survived. Ill kill you a thousand different ways, over and over and

She cut the connection before he could finish.

It took a good fifteen minutes to rendezvous with the rogue nova drive, which had stabilized sufficiently to cease spinning and match course with Megans lifeboat. The cage to the rear of the lifesupport units opened wide, like the leaves of a flower spun from silver mesh, closing around the drive as it was manoeuvred into position.

Megan worked feverishly, running a systems update that allowed the drive to integrate with the lifeboats low-level AI. Once that was completed, crude drive-spines dotted around the lifeboats hull flickered with eerie lightning, sucking energy out of the interstellar void.

The stars shimmered and changed. Megan laughed, pounding the interior of her life-support unit with her fists. But the laughter turned to sobs, with tears cascading down her cheeks.

She forced herself to take deep, even breaths, then activated the cryonic circuits. She was now going to sleep for a long, long time, but get home she would. And when she awoke under some different star, with the familiar chatter of human worlds filling the comms circuits, she would remember Bash and ask his spirit to forgive her before she set about picking up whatever pieces remained of her former life.

TWENTY-ONE

Gabrielle

2763 (the present)

A few hours after Gabrielle, the Speaker-Elect of the Sacerdotal Demarchy of Uchida, had been taken on board a dropship by the man she had known as Karl Petrova, but who was in truth some stranger named Tarrant, she felt the ship begin to rumble around her.

She had run from Tarrant after telling him she was pregnant with his child, and hidden herself within a storage locker in another part of the dropship. She had curled up in a ball in the zero gravity, her eyes still full of the images Tarrant had shown her of vast waves spreading inland through the Demarchy, crushing everything and wiping whole cities and towns out of existence.

He was, in some way she did not yet understand, responsible for this devastation. That made her, in a sense, an accessory to the worst of all imaginable crimes.